Inside Health

ABOUT NEW YORK; Trying to Give Police the Right Answer, Even When It's Wrong

By JIM DWYER

Published: June 13, 2007

Ask him a question. Ozem Goldwire holds onto it across a half-dozen conversational detours, and keeps working on it until he is sure you have gotten precisely what you were looking for.

This dogged answering, it turns out, is consistent with the diagnosis of ''Pervasive Developmental Disorder with Autistic Features'' that sent Mr. Goldwire into special educational programs from the age of 4.

He takes questions very seriously.

He had a job -- before he was questioned by six detectives in a Brooklyn police station over 17 hours and confessed to murdering his sister; before he spent a year in jail awaiting trial; and before the charges were dropped last week because he is innocent. He worked at a kosher food plant in Maspeth, Queens.

He takes questions very seriously.

So here is the question.

What kinds of food did he make?

Mr. Goldwire, age 28, sits erect. The strap of a computer bag is looped over his shoulder. The bag rests on his stomach as he speaks, and he never moves it during two hours of conversation. His voice is deep, the words uninflected. Not surprisingly, he was the valedictorian of his eighth-grade class.

The conversation shifts -- not Mr. Goldwire's doing -- to his hours and the buses he took to work from 72 Rockaway Avenue, the house in Brownsville, Brooklyn, that he shared with his sister, Shereika, who was a year older.

Three minutes later, without preamble, he picks up the question of his food preparation work.

On the evening of Jan. 2, 2006, this man -- who has been described his entire life as polite and meek, who survives in the world through rigorous routines -- arrived home to a barrage of disorder. One of two locks on the door was open. Lights were on in the bedroom, living room and basement. A closet was open and ransacked; the top drawer of his desk had been jimmied.

He went to the second floor, saw Shereika under a sheet on her bed, saliva and blood around her mouth. He called 911 around 8 p.m. On the tape, Mr. Goldwire, who had been unable to speak in complete sentences at age 6, can be heard struggling to calm his voice.

''Huh-huh, this is Ozem Goldwire of 72 Rockaway Avenue,'' he says, between gasps. ''It's between Sumpter Street and Marion Street. Somehow my home had been wrecked a bit and when I went upstairs to check -- to see my sister -- and I saw her lying in bed and her mouth full of blood.''

At 3 a.m., he gave detectives in the 73rd Precinct a statement about finding her. He gave the same account at 1 p.m. Two hours later, though, he wrote out a different version, saying that they had argued two nights earlier over the television volume, that he had hit her with a cookie tin, then strangled her. The next morning, he wrote, he had gone to work, thought he had dreamed it all, and came home to find the house rummaged. ''She remained dead -- this was a bad accident,'' he wrote.

A few hours later, when a prosecutor arrived with a videocamera, Mr. Goldwire dropped the confession. Asked why he had told the detective that he killed her, he said that the detectives had been ''tough'' on him, though not physically.

When Mr. Goldwire was in Rikers Island, his lawyer, Gary Farrell, told prosecutors that the confession was unreliable, given his background. Kenneth Taub and Robert Lamb of the Brooklyn district attorney's office hired a psychologist, Kathy F. Yates, who found that he was highly suggestible, eager to please. ''It is likely that he wanted to meet the needs of the detectives as a well as to bring the interview to an end,'' she wrote.

No audio or video record exists of Mr. Goldwire's interactions with detectives during the 17 hours leading up to his confession.

''Here we had the ingredients of the perfect storm for false confession,'' Judge Gustin L. Reichbach said in court last week, dismissing the charges at the request of the prosecution and the defense. ''You're actually innocent of this crime.''

As for the real killer, Mr. Taub, the prosecutor, said investigators are now looking at a neighborhood man who had conned $17,000 from Mr. Goldwire during the two years before Shereika's death. The same man stopped Mr. Goldwire just yesterday, asking for money again. He declined.

Photo: Ozem Goldwire, at his Brooklyn home, holding a photograph of his sister, Shereika, who was killed in 2006. He made a false confession to the killing and spent a year in jail. (Photo by Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times)